Category: Registration System

Your website includes an online registration system that can be used to collect member data online, as well as electronic payments. You can specify a number of criteria for program eligibility, maximum participants, costs and and payment methods, including credit card processing.

The registration system handles secure sign-in for registrants and contains built-in forms to gather contact information for both children and their parents. In addition, you can specify a number of additional custom questions for whatever information your club requires, using a variety of question types. Finally, registrants can pay online, securely using a credit card or echeck.

The procedure for setting up an online registration system is as follows:

Create a new program or copy an existing one.Admin > Members > Registration System > Add (or Clone)
Programs are categories or classifications used to differentiate groups of registrants. For instance you may have separate programs for boys and girls and also for those in different age groups. Each program might have its own set of eligibility requirements, costs and questions. Dividing registrations into multiple programs also makes it easier to manage large numbers of registrants.

Edit Settings.Registration System > Edit
When you create or copy and existing program, you'll first specify its general properties such as its title, description, open, late and close dates, eligibility requirements (age, school grade, gender, new and/or existing members), and residence requirements and a maximum number of registrants. You'll also specify a base cost, late fee (if any) and optional multi-child discounts. You can also specify a payment schedule for those clubs that allow graduated payments for their programs. In addition, you can specify merchant account information for processing credit cards.

Add questions.Registration System > Form
After specifying general properties for your program, you create or modify the supplemental questions you require, using the provided tools and question types, explained later. The registration engine already asks users for their name, address, phone numbers and email address. This information is also collected for children along with their gender, age and school grade (if grade qualifications are set) as well as their other guardian's information. Therefore, your form only needs to gather whatever additional information you require.

Test and publish.
Finally, you'll want to test the program to make sure everything works as expected before you open it up to the public. To do this, set the open date to today, and mark the registration as Admin-only .

Once your programs are set up and tested, you can make them available to the public by setting their open date to the present. When you do, your website will have a new menu item on the Association menu titled "Register Online." Visitors will then be able to click it and the resulting page will list the titles and descriptions of the various programs you've set up . They can then choose one and proceed to log in and enter or review their contact information for their entire family.

New members: will be asked for their email address and name, and will subsequently be emailed a password to log in with.

Existing members: (those already in your member database) will be prompted for their email address and their personal password.

Note: users that haven't previously been issued a password or can't remember it can have their existing password emailed to them instantly by entering their email address only and clicking submit.

After your programs have been made available to the public and registration begins, there are several tools available that let you list registrants, account for payments and download all registration data for further processing. Downloaded data can be brought into a spreadsheet or database program for further manipulation.

Credit card processing
We allow the use of any merchant account that uses Sage/Net 1, AuthorizeNet, BluePay or Secure Paytech for its gateway as well as PayPal Business accounts for credit card processing. Merchant accounts have the advantage of settling transactions directly to your bank account and offer very competitive rates. The other advantage to using a merchant account is that it allows us to simplify the credit card payment process for your users while keeping them on your website. If your organization does not have a merchant account, LeagueAthletics.com strongly recommends using Cam Neely's Processing with a Purpose through Sage Payment Systems.

While PayPal accounts are easy to set up and accept American Express, Discover and eChecks in addition to Mastercard and Visa, they have the disadvantage of sending your members to another site to process payments. Also, if using a PayPal account you will NOT be able to setup schedule payments in your registration programs.

If your club hosts more than one financial entity (Babe Ruth & Little League for example), you can set up a merchant account for each in order to simplify book keeping. Each registration program has a place for the merchant account ID, so you can use different ones in different programs. Even if a user registers in several programs that have different accounts, they will only be charged once and our software will seamlessly process the different amounts to each account invisibly to the user.

The Add button will create an entirely new, blank registration program and open its properties form.

Clone

This button will create an exact copy the currently selected registration program (minus the registered members) from the list and allow you to begin editing its properties form. Once you've set up and tested your first program, you can use this button to quickly copy and modify subsequent versions for the various programs you need to create rather than creating them all from scratch.

Edit

Click the Edit button to go to the selected program's properties form. Here you'll be able to specify various settings for the program and continue on to define and edit supplemental questions.

Delete

The Delete button will remove the selected program from the list and also delete all its data, both definitions and actual registration data. Obviously, this button should be used with care. You should use it only to clean up obsolete registration programs and their data after they are no longer of use.

Lookout! Once a registration program has been deleted it cannot be restored, so you'll want to make sure you are deleting the correct program. Also, there is no need to delete past registrations as you'll want to keep these for historical records.

The Form button should be used to view, add or edit the supplemental question list. This will only show the questions that you have created. You may edit questions by clicking on their name. You may also add questions by clicking on the "Add a new question" link. Optionally you may click the "Preview the form" link to test your supplemental questions. This will only preview the supplemental question form.

List

Clicking this button will bring up a listing page showing all members who have signed up for the selected program. The page will list their names, birthdays, school grade, the date they registered, the cost of their registration, the amount they've paid and their Wait List status. In addition, you can optionally include columns for your supplemental question answers as well. The column for the amount paid contains input boxes for each registrant so that you can record checks you receive after someone signs up.

You can also choose to email registrants, transfer registrant from one program to another and add an amount to selected registrants all from this report. Simply check the box to the left of a registrant's name. At the bottom of the page, you can select what you'd like to do from the "Choose Action" drop-down selections.

Assign

You can use this button to assign registrants to teams. When clicked, you'll be presented with a page listing all your current teams on the left side and the names of all registrants on the right. You can then drag (press and hold the left mouse button) registrant names from the right and drop (move to and let go of the left mouse button) them onto any of the listed teams. This can make roster assignments very quick and easy.

This button is used to download all the data for the selected program into an Excel file on your computer that you can use for backup purposes or for further processing. As mentioned above, downloaded data can be used in conjunction with other programs to further process data. The file can be directly loaded into other spreadsheet or database programs.

This button can be used to create custom player and coach bio sheets that can be shown online and printed from your website. The player bio sheets are tied to registration data, and you can choose to include any information you would like. For example, if your football program needs to print individual player information sheets for the league, you can create a custom format, and generate all of these player bio sheets to be printed.

Hide Older Registration Programs

This option allows you to hide those registration programs where the close date is greater than 90 days old.

Day Pass for Registration Login

This can be a very useful tool for clubs that still offer a "walk-in" or "in-person" registration. The password entered here will allow registrants, both new and existing, to access or create a registration account. New registrants will not have to
establish a temporary password via email to log into the registration system. The password entered here will be good through the end of the day (midnight) of the day that it was entered.

***IF BEING USED ON A PUBLIC COMPUTER WHERE MULTIPLE REGISTRATIONS WILL BE PROCESSED, AN ADMINISTRATOR MUST BE PRESENT TO EITHER CLEAR COOKIES BY LOGGING OFF REGISTRATION OR RESTART THE BROWSER AFTER EACH REGISTRATION. IF THIS CANNOT BE DONE, IT IS STRONGLY RECOMMENDED THAT YOU DO NOT USE THIS FEATURE***

Registration Page Instructions

This information will appear at the top of your Registration page. You can enter any supplemental instructions you may require for your site's Register Online home page. You may want to provide information about general policies, requirements for additional paperwork, eligibility, payment policies, etc.